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This month, Facebook came under fire for allegations of censoring conservative-slanted news from users’ supposedly auto-generated Facebook news feed. In an interview with Gizmodo, a former team member said that a group of Facebook employees personally curates the articles that get the most promotion through Facebook, with a bias toward mainstream sites like CNN and BBC and against fringe sites like Breitbart and NewsMax. Though the company has denied the allegations of bias, the report has had an oddly out-sized impact over recent weeks. Not only conservatives are beginning to turn on the service, but anyone with reservations about the company’s aggressive history of social engineering. The company will willfully interfere with our feelings, why not our political beliefs as well?

Now, it turns out that the company finds this reputation worrying enough to attack it head on. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg will host a meeting with leading conservative personalities to try to smooth things over. Figures including Glenn Beck and Arthur Brooks will meet, presumably to offer pointed criticism before allowing their feathers to be professionally unruffled. But the impact of this episode could go far beyond Facebook’s popularity with Glenn Beck’s listenership; it’s a test of whether Facebook is controlled for the benefit of its users, or if users are controlled for the benefit of Facebook.

Many have written about the various ways in which Facebook is beholden to its advertisers, how it shapes our view of the world according to its business priorities. But this scandal isn’t about the demands of some over-aggressive shoe company — nobody has implied that Facebook was paid to do this. It’s primarily a result of Facebook’s struggles to remain relevant, and its limitless sense of entitlement to tweak its own service experimentally.

One thing that came out in the Gizmodo interview is Facebook’s obsession with owning real-time news online — if there’s one enormous thing happening, be it a sporting event or a global disaster or a major election, Zuckerberg wants you to know that you can turn on Facebook and automatically see exactly what you’re looking for. Employees were reportedly reprimanded if Facebook feeds ignored stories that dominated sites like Twitter, leading toward a natural, multi-platform regression toward the largest and most prolific media outlets. If you have to have the story of the day, in all cases, then there is correspondingly less time and space to dedicate to stories outside that core zeitgeist.

It all started out so nice and simple…

The individual dispositions of Facebook employees aside, it seems unlikely that there is an over-arching policy at Facebook to give some users a lower level of engagement and personalization — even if that’s the effect these policies end up having. Zuckerberg isn’t lying when he says that the reason this issue is important is that “it gets to the core of everything Facebook is… Every tool we build is designed to give more people a voice and bring our global community together.” But Facebook seems to think that it can have its cake and eat it, too — to force a perfect society into existence, then call that society free.

What sets Facebook apart from other social media sites is that it has no interest in owning some small aspect of your brain and social life, like Twitter and Snapchat, nor does it want to be some sort of hub for a single small community, like Medium. Facebook wants to be a platform on which it can build all the social media experiences for everyone — much like Google Plus, and with all the same inherent problems. The whole point of social media is to enhance naturally occurring social trends, while the whole point of a media empire is to get to decide which social trends naturally occur.

Zuckerberg will have to work hard to undo the cognitive dissonance in that design.

And so, it’s necessary to do public outreach when a perception of bias pops us. In principle, it ought to be easier to simply assure users of precisely how the News Feed works. Like Twitter’s recently abandoned reverse-chronological timeline, this would put the onus for quality entirely on the user-base and, also like Twitter, it means that users are fully capable of making their own experience terrible, or full of offensive content. Some companies choose to allow that chaos out of fear of breaking their special sauce, or ideological beliefs about it being wrong to do so. Others don’t. Facebook’s official explanation of the News Feed is that “The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook.” Ah, so that’s what “influences” them, is it? Good to know.

Whatever you think of Glenn Beck and others like him, it’s clear that there’s no real reason for them to accept this apology, since it really isn’t an apology at all. An apology would be a statement that things will be different — but in this case, the goal is to educate the ignorant about how Facebook is, in fact, doing things properly. The concern is basically that the way Facebook controls the media content it promotes will always lead to these sorts of problems, regardless of intentions or skill on the part of the platform holder.

Facebook seems to have no awareness of the severity of the problem. It thinks it perhaps hired some of the wrong people, or that it needs to update a learning algorithm somewhere — it still seems to be received wisdom that Facebook can, in principle, force people into intellectual freedom, manipulate people into empowerment, and deceive people into knowledge.

The problem, for Facebook, is that it neither idealistic enough nor cynical enough. If it were either, it could be something simple and pure — a correlation-finder for the activity of a small group of selected friends, or an intellectual syringe for injection of corporate and political GoodThink. This half-assed chimera we’re seeing now will only continue to generate these sorts of scandals — and Zuckerberg can’t put out the fires forever.

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